Look At The Delay Time

A delay time calculator is essential tool when adding effects to your sound. We know that adding effects is a way to enhance a sound using mixing tools like the delay and reverb. The focus of this blog post is about the delay time that applies to delay and reverb audio effects. Remember, an audio effect only works on an audio signal. One good reason to use a delay time calculator is to time your delay time with the tempo of your track, doing this will add depth without being noticeable otherwise it will stick out.

I usually look at a delay chart to see what delay time I should use for a specific tempo. A tempo of a song is the BPM of the track also known as the beats per minute. It's important to stick with the BPM for the genre of your music because it the rhythm that listeners are familiar with. Before talking about delay time, we need to know about the time signature and what that represent on music sheet.

Time Signature

A time signature tells you how many beats are in a measure and what the length of the note that represent a beat. A time signature of a track looks like a fraction where the numerator / top indicates how many beats are in a measure and the denominator / bottom indicates the note length of the beat. The most common time signature in dance music is 4/4, that means there are four beats per measure and each beat is represented by a quarter note. There are many other time signatures in music, but we will focus on the 4/4 for this post.

Now that we know about time signatures, we need to know the BPM of our track. In dance music you will notice that there's a range of BPM used and you pick the BPM based on the genre of dance music. I feel 128 BPM and 126 BPM are the most common ones and they produce very danceable rhythm that people are used to. If you do some quick math that's around two beats per second. How did I know that?

For 128 BPM there are 128 beats in a minute and there are 60 seconds in a minute. So, if we divide 128 by 60, we will get around 2 beats per second. You can also find out how many measures are in a minute if you use your BPM and time signature. Let's say 128 BPM in a 4/4 time signature, the number of measures in a minute is 128 divided by 4 which equals 32 measures.

Measures

Why is important to know the measure of a track? The measure is used to help create patterns in your track and its very important element in dance music, we want to create tracks that mixes well with other tracks. When you think of measures you usually think in terms of 4 and any number that is divisible by 4 like 8, 16, 32. You use measures to define each section of your track and the BPM of your track will determine how much time you have in each section. It's important to know this information and the delay time calculator helps you calculate time.

Delay Time

So, what is a delay time calculator and how can we use them? We use delay time calculator to calculate the delay time for a reverb or delay effect, this will synchronize our effect with the tempo of the song so it enhances the groove of the track. In other words, we want the effect to go with the beat of the track. Another useful use case is we can use delay time to know how long each measure is and that will tell us how long each section of our song is.

I usually have to look at a delay chart to find this information out but I decided to create my own delay time calculator for the 4/4 time signature. That way I can use it whenever I want and will give me a better understanding how to calculate delay time.

Delay Time Caculator